Too Jewish: Book 1, The Cooper Family Saga

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“...maybe the greatest New Orleans author of the past 1/4 century." -Failed Messiah
“A powerful and emotional story of a Jewish family here in America.” -Life in Review
THEIR OWN FAMILY TRIED TO DESTROY THEIR MARRIAGE...
...but love kept them together... The Powerful Love Story of a Jewish-American Family
This is the FIRST book in the Cooper Family Saga.

"If you like New Orleans, if you’re interested in its Jewish community or Southern life or simply the rhythms of America’s most unique city, you’ll love Too Jewish. And even if you don’t give a hoot about NOLA and its Jews, buy Too Jewish for another reason: it’s a great read.” -Failed Messiah

Like Patty Friedmann's father, young, brainy protagonist Bernie Cooper escapes Nazi Germany and ends up in New Orleans, where he finds an entirely new kind of prejudice against Jews—the kind that comes from other Jews. Sadly, they’re his own in-laws.

At first this strikes him only as petty and small-minded, but he has no idea how much hatred his scheming mother-in-law can wring from the situation. She knows, for instance, that he had to leave behind his beloved mother, and she uses his mother’s life and memory as a lever against him, eventually causing him physical and mental problems that threaten his family’s well-being in every possible way and thwart him at every turn.

Thus, Bernie and Letty’s daughter Darby is born into the most peculiar of mixed marriages, torn, as her mother is, between loyalty to her grandparents and to her father. Even she, at her tender age, wonders whether Letty’s love--and her own--can save Bernie from the secret pain and guilt of surviving the Holocaust. And from the machinations of his cruel mother-in-law.

A bittersweet love story told in three novellas, each from the point of view of one member of the Cooper family. Think The Time Traveler’s Wife. Definitely a love story; definitely not a “romance.”

(And somewhat autobiographical: Too Jewish tells a story much like the central tale of Patty Friedmann's young life: her father suffered from survivor guilt, all the while trying to make his way in a hostile society.)

"Walker Percy once wrote that 'the next Southern literary revival will be led by a Jewish mother, which is to say, a shrewd self-possessed woman with a sharp eye and a cunning retentive mind who sees the small triumphs and tragedies around her and has her own secret method of rendering it, with an art all her own.’ And that is totally Patty Friedmann.” -Anne Gisleson, Signposts in a Strange Land